Meg Hansen does not want you to underestimate her.
Coming in at just around five feet tall, with bulbous cheek bones and almost shockingly flawless skin, Hansen said she knows her youthful and petite appearance can detract from the issues behind her campaign for lieutenant governor.
“A lot of people like to comment on that,” she said.
Which is why she tried to evade questions about her exact age. “I’ll be 35 when I’m lieutenant governor,” she said, “I’ll say that.”
Despite her political inexperience — this is Hansen’s first campaign — she argues that she isn’t inexperienced with the issues Vermont’s middle class and small business owners are facing. A communications consultant and host of the show “Dialogues with Meg Hansen” on YCN — a local news channel that serves Vermont, Northern New York and New Hampshire — she said she’s been able to connect with hundreds of Vermonters who tell her repeatedly that they can’t afford to build businesses, and their personal lives, in the Green Mountain State.
Which is why she’s running for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor on a platform to return Vermont to a “pro-prosperity” and “pro-freedom” state. Hansen argues that the state has too much red tape and too high property taxes, which keeps it from attracting businesses that go elsewhere. Hansen said she thinks she can use the lieutenant governor position as a platform to voice these concerns through listening tours and the potential continuation of her show.
“There are definitely people whose voices are not heard. There are values and convictions that need to be heard. That need to be a part of the public sphere, of the public discourse,” Hansen said. “And I would certainly be the voice for that, the representative of that.”
Hansen is running against four other Republicans. Most formidable is Scott Milne, who lost a 2014 gubernatorial bid narrowly, and is a well-known businessman. But Hansen is leading in money raised. She’s brought in almost $30,000, compared to Milne’s $5,297, the majority of which he contributed himself. Dana Colson has only landed about $1,500, and her two other competitors, Jim Hogue and Dwayne Tucker, don’t have finance records with the Secretary of State’s Office.
Her attraction to free-market ideology stems from the lack of mobility her family experienced in India, where Hansen was born. Her family immigrated to the United States when Hansen was 7 months old. She was born into the highest caste in India, the Brahmins, which is known as the priest and academic caste. So her grandfather was able to become a chemical engineer.
But because he was born during British India rule, Hansen said, he later found that he couldn’t find the opportunities he was looking for in socialist India in the late 1900s. So her family came to the United States and made a home in Texas. Around that time, doctors found Hansen’s mother had a brain tumor. She was given only a few months to live.
“That was very devastating,” she said. While her father took Hansen’s mother “everywhere” to find treatment, Hansen said her maternal grandparents took custody of her and her brother. While her mother ended up living for a few more years, she died when Hansen was 8 years old.
Her death would later inform the start of Hansen’s professional career — which took various twists and turns that landed her in countries across Europe. In an effort to continue the legacy of her mother, who was a doctor, Hansen felt pressured by her family to enroll in medical school. So she returned to India and trained to become a doctor. “During that time I had come to terms with the fact that I was in this for the wrong reasons,” Hansen said. “This is not where my strengths are, and that I should really change my life and do what I was called to do.”
She got her degree but didn’t become a doctor, much to the disappointment of her family. She knew she wanted to serve people, but not through the medium of medicine. Instead, she took another left turn and ended up at a fashion school in Italy, studying the culture and art behind fashion.
But she was also drawn to fashion sustainability. So after she graduated from fashion school she worked for a clothing company in Oslo, Norway. There, she specialized in textile sustainability and served as an eco-sustainability ambassador and seminar instructor for the brand. “So I started understanding sustainability, pollution, climate and how that interfaces with our daily lives and commercialism.”
After about a year in Oslo she moved to London to work for another company where she did similar fashion sustainability work. But while in London, she reacquainted with another calling: writing.
“I started writing again,” she said. “That was my fate and I had lost it. And that was one of the things I was very devastated about.”
She had always wanted to get her Ph.D., and at this point she felt she had enough real-world experience to dive back into her intellectual curiosity. So she enrolled in Dartmouth College and majored in liberal studies — a vague field of study by name, but Hansen specialized in studying the United States’ Gilded Age.
While she was studying in New Hampshire, Hansen was living in Windsor. While studying at Dartmouth, she met her husband, who is a librarian. When she graduated in 2014 with a master’s degree, she also founded her communications consulting company, called Pierson A. Harleth Co.
Hansen said she began to become more interested in politics while living in Windsor, a small town of about 3,400 people. She described the town, the “Birthplace of Vermont,” as a “very economically depressed place.”
“We have closed storefronts. And there’s a culture of despair and addiction,” Hansen said. “That was a very, very formative experience. Because I was like, ‘Why is this happening here?’ Compared to New Hampshire. It’s such a stark difference. So that’s when I started getting into Vermont politics, specifically.”
She wanted to learn more about how specific policies may be driving economic growth in one area of the state — or across the border in New Hampshire — but not others. That drew her ire to Vermont’s high property taxes and land-use regulations like Act 250.
She has also been outspoken about Vermont’s health care systems. In 2018, Hansen became executive director of Vermonters for Healthcare Freedom, a Montpelier-based health policy nonprofit that is “committed to fostering free market reforms in American health care.” She’s also written commentaries detailing her adamant disapproval of single-payer health care systems and Obamacare health care policies.
The nonprofit has been accused of pushing a “propaganda campaign” and for propagating conspiracy theories, according to supporters of single-payer models.
Hansen was also tapped to become a fellow with the Republican National Convention through its Republican initiative leadership program in 2015. It was a volunteer position geared toward building grassroots support among Vermont Republicans, which Hansen said allowed her to become connected with more political players and hear more from Vermonters about what they wanted from their legislators.
Politics has allowed Hansen to combine her skills as a communicator and her passions for policy change centered around free-market participation. “I thought, OK, this is what I need to do. This is what I should be doing. Because I was talking to people and they appreciated it,” she said. “They appreciated me and where I’m coming from. I heard over and over and over again, ‘My voice is not heard. I’m not represented in Montpelier.’”
This passion eventually evolved into her YCN show, “Dialogues with Meg Hansen.” While the production is currently on pause because of Covid-19, Hansen said the show was started a little over a year ago.
The episodes are short, usually around five minutes long, and they cover local issues in Vermont communities. She presents herself as a journalist, but she still manages to casually introduce her political ideology, as seen in an episode discussing the EB-5 scandal.
“So when we look at this idea, especially from Montpelier, that government is going to solve a problem, it seems like government is creating a lot of problems?” she asked her guests during a discussion.
But Hansen doesn’t view the show as a conduit for her point of view. “The main thing is, people who feel unheard and silenced sometimes even, it’s giving them a platform, that’s it. And having a conversation about topics that people need to know about.”
In the political circles she’s involved in, she has a reputation as an effective communicator and facilitator of discussion, said RNC Committeewoman Suzanne Butterfield, who considers herself a mentor and friend of Hansen’s. She said she first met Hansen about 10 years ago when Butterfield was the chair of the Windsor County Republicans.
When Hansen speaks, her vocabulary can become a bit lofty, showing off her liberal arts pedigree. This wasn’t lost on Butterfield, who said when she first met Hansen, she came off as well-spoken and energetic.
“This woman was super intellectual, but in a really good listening way,” Butterfield said. As they became friends over the years, Butterfield said she admired the way Hansen would take control of discussions in a Montpelier-based discussion group.
Butterfield said that when Hansen told her she was running for lieutenant governor, she said she couldn’t help but roll her eyes, knowing that a statewide race can be an uphill battle for relatively unknown figures. “But she was up for the challenge with all the enthusiasm,” Butterfield said. “You can’t throw a bucket of cold water on something like that.”
Hansen has been endorsed by about a dozen Republican state legislators, including Rep. Mark Higley, R-Lowell. He said he doesn’t know Hansen too well — he described himself as an acquaintance — but he was attracted to her enthusiasm for reviving Vermont’s economy and listening to those whose business dreams have been caught up in Vermont’s regulatory structures.
“I started listening to some of her information she was putting out there,” Higley said. “And boy, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s what I’ve been kind of advocating for the past 12 years I’ve been down in Montpelier.”
He said he’s also attracted to her background as an immigrant who has led a successful path both internationally and in the United States.
However, Hansen said her identity as a woman of color and immigrant representing the Republican Party has drawn criticism from people on the political left, who she said have called her a “race traitor.”
“I get that a lot,” she said.
But it’s also drawn negativity from the right. Hansen charged that a fellow Republican told her to go back to India, although she wouldn’t say who made the comment because she didn’t want to add to political divisiveness. Hansen said she did report the comment to GOP Chair Deb Billado. (Billado declined to comment to VTDigger about the incident, saying she doesn’t discuss private conversations with candidates.)
During the Republican lieutenant governor debate held on PBS, fellow candidate Dana Colson asked Hansen if she met the four-year residency requirement to run for LG, despite her living here for 10 years.
Hansen wouldn’t directly say if she thought Colson’s question was racist or xenophobic. “I just answered Dana Colson’s question directly. I can’t help that,” she said.
She’s not willing to call out her opponents for the same reasons she’s unwilling to speak out against President Donald Trump, who she supports, when he makes unsavory comments that she disagrees with: she doesn’t want to feed the division. Or distract from the issues she’s passionate about.
Instead, she said she wants to focus on the momentum behind her campaign. And be the most effective communicator she can for Vermonters if she’s elected to the lieutenant governor seat.
“I am very serious and very focused about what I want to do,” Hansen said. “And what I can do is what I’m doing. I can put my name on the ballot, I can run for office, I can advocate for families, I can talk about Vermont and I can talk about deregulation. I can be a spokesperson for that. As I said, I can be the person walking toward the fire.”
“I can be the one saying, ‘You know what? No. It’s not a little elitist club there where they just pick who wants to be the next lieutenant governor.’ We can also make a difference. The voice of the people matters,” she said. “That’s what I can do.”
